It is at times hard to distill that which unites the people and projects that ravel under the name ‘synthetic biol- ogy,’” Sophia Roosth notes in this new ethnography, but that doesn’t stop her from following the field in flux, track-ing “brave new organisms” (and those whomake them) through classrooms and indus-trial laboratories from Boston to the BayArea and from neighborhood bars to far-flung conferences. A chimera of anthropol-ogy bred with a dash of history, Syntheticreads synthetic biology’s constructs both as“materialized theories” and as “postcardsfrom a particular cultural moment.”Navigating the shimmering categories ofthe natural, unnatural, supernatural, andpostnatural, Roosth plays with traditionalethnographic conventions of the anthropolo-gists’ toolkit—religion, kinship, economy andproperty, labor, household, and origin tales—to show how “the form and function of life-forms have … oftentimes paralleled social,historical, and political forms of life.”Roosth turns in her first chapter to DrewEndy’s early work redesigning the T7 virus.Keenly aware that the field’s “distinctive-ness is more apparent in its approach andits practitioners’ speech than in the day-to-day benchwork of its labs,” her broader“evolutionary tales MIT synthetic biologiststell themselves about themselves.” Not onlydid Endy want to fight against the tyrannyof evolution and “mutation without repre-sentation,” but in the wake of the Kitzmillerdecision, tropes of “creation,” “construc-tion,” and “intelligent design” regularlyplayed out in lab conversations.

The second chapter shifts to California,
where Roosth explores the “genealogical
logics” inherent in the work of Jay Keasling
and others and relates advances in metabolic
engineering to queer ideas of kinship and
biocapital. Encountering “promiscuous” enzymes and “unnatural” metabolic pathways,
Roosth troubles notions of synthetic relatedness and traces biological messiness through
“scrambled species boundaries” that range,
literally, from queer to kosher.

Legal frameworks can generate bugs, too:“I don’t want wheat fields in 2100 to operatelike Windows 95,” Endy once said. Normsof sharing, commitments to an open-sourcebiology, and concerns regarding intellectualproperty—patents, copyright, and copyleft,not to mention breaches of credit—domi-nate the third chapter, a retelling of theBioBrick road and of the contestation sur-rounding Craig Venter’s synthetic genomicwatermark moment. By lifting the contri-butions of others to our attention, Roosthreflexively illustrates how even egregiousrepresentation without citation is “neverneatly resolvable.”But if that was the synthetic biologythat was, the deskilling and robotizationof synthetic biology emerges as Roosth’snext focus. Examining the assembly linesof Gingko Bioworks and Amyris—whichshe also sites under the specter of Marx andthe “sway of management theory”—she ar-gues that “when biological manufacture isscaled up and routinized, biology no lon-ger requires biologists.” Indeed, as designis decoupled from manufacture and “scalereplaces skill,” biomanufacturing “no longerfurthers biological knowledge. Instead, it isantithetical to it.”The ironies persist into the fifth chapter,in which—following a quick interlude ofKant—we arrive at the world of DIY ama-teurs, the field’s cool but “disqualified andillegitimate kin.” Converting labor intoleisure by making hacking a home-basedhobby, these bio(p)artisans critique “the be-hemoths of biotechnology” with manifestospromoting biohacking as a mode of politi-cal action. Conducting labwork in kitch-ens scarcely ensures domestic tranquility,however, and Roosth characterizes some ofDIYbio’s efforts as “noticeably antagonistic,roguish, and mischievous in tone.”Other limits of coolness are reached inthe sixth chapter, where Roosth exploresthe “frosty enterprise” of “biotechnical res-urrection.” Recounting recent efforts at de-extinction, she suggests that frozen embryosare not beholden to time in the same wayas other biological creatures. Freezing, shenotes, “grafts the past (species whose timehas run out) and the past imperfect (rare orendangered species) onto the present (spe-cies filling in as surrogates for rare animals)in order to capacitate future life-forms.”“There is no there there,” Roosth ulti-mately concludes, channeling GertrudeStein’s method of wreaking worlds withwords. “What counts as ‘real’ or ‘original’no longer makes any genetic, genealogical,ontological, or historical sense.” But at thispoint it becomes clear that such conflationand endless recursion is at the very centerof her inquiry. The book fittingly reachesa crescendo with a queer self-portrait, asurreal “reading of a reading of a paintingabout painting” by René Magritte.

Synthetic offers a writerly assemblage of
our synthetic moment, where densely evocative analytical contributions and cognitive fireworks are juxtaposed with intimate
confessions, all in the poetry of contemporary ethnography. j